About Good Housing Virginia

Good Housing was established in September 2024, when attainable housing developer Kim Hart joined forces with John Pellerito and Colin Stiles, with equity investment from Cypress Real Estate Company, the market-rate land investment firm Pellerito and Stiles co-founded. The company builds on Kim Hart’s three decades of affordable housing work in Loudoun County, including his years leading Good Works, and pairs it with the land acquisition, entitlement, and capital formation experience his partners gained at national homebuilders and at Cypress. Together the team brings more than 50 years of collective experience in the real estate industry.

Inclusionary zoning requirements across Northern Virginia ask new residential developments to set aside a share of homes as affordable, and delivering on that obligation calls for a different set of skills than market-rate development. Hart describes the strongest long-term model as mixed-income: market-rate and affordable homes in the same project, planned by people who understand both.

What Good Housing does

Good Housing develops stand-alone affordable apartment communities, and it partners with market-rate homebuilders to plan, finance, and deliver the affordable component of larger mixed-income and mixed-use projects, whether that obligation comes from an Affordable Dwelling Unit (ADU) ordinance, an inclusionary zoning requirement, or a commitment made to secure rezoning approval. Good Housing owns and operates its communities, working with professional property management firms on day-to-day management. Its two founding goals are to assist local jurisdictions in meeting their attainable housing objectives and to help market-rate homebuilders fulfill their affordable housing requirements.

Where Good Housing works

Good Housing’s communities in development are located in Loudoun County (Sterling and Leesburg), Fairfax County (Herndon), Prince William County (Dumfries), and the City of Manassas.

“Our focus has been pretty much solely Northern Virginia,”

says Managing Principal John Pellerito, pointing to jurisdictions that rank among the wealthiest in the country by area median income and face some of the steepest housing affordability challenges.

How the communities are financed

Good Housing capitalizes its affordable developments with a combination of internal capital, federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, tax-exempt bonds from Virginia Housing, loans from local jurisdictions, along with federal, state, and local grants.

Working with local jurisdictions

Counties and cities across Northern Virginia have adopted attainable housing goals, and approvals are often the slowest part of delivering on them. Kim Hart brought a proposal for a pilot expedited review program to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. The first community developed under that pilot moved through rezoning, site plan approval, and permitting in parallel rather than one stage after another, with the developer and county staff meeting regularly, and a review that typically takes years was completed in months. Loudoun County has since adopted a formal expedited review policy for fully affordable developments, and Good Housing works with jurisdictions in the same collaborative way.

“It takes political will,”

says Hart. “You have to have a jurisdiction that says, ‘We understand this is a problem, and we will take exceptional steps to try and solve it.’”

Construction progress

Design and sustainability

Every Good Housing community is built to a certified green standard and designed to be architecturally attractive. That commitment reflects Kim Hart’s long involvement in the green building movement, as a published author on the subject and as a developer who has used sustainable design to change how attainable housing is perceived.